SOCIETY
BREAKING THE GRIP OF We believe the spiritual liberation of a community is fundamental to God’s plan of salvation, says Dr Modupe Omideyi, chair of Lighthouse Harmonize Education Trust.
“T
he Spirit of the Lord is on me, because He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (Luke 4:18-19). Generally, when Christians think of spiritual freedom, it is usually in terms of individuals coming to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, repenting of their sin, and entering a new life as a child of God. They have been set free from spiritual ignorance (John 8:12), judgement (John 3:18), condemnation (Romans 8:1), and spiritual death (John 8:51). There is, however, an aspect of spiritual freedom which we believe is fundamental to God’s plan of salvation, and that is the spiritual liberation of a community. 18 MAY / JUN 2020
Sometimes a community can be so oppressed that the church needs to take ownership and engage in overcoming those powers.
When people are enslaved, they cannot even move towards worshipping God. When Moses reiterated God’s promise to the Israelites, Exodus 6:9 states that “… they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and cruel bondage”. It is when people are released from bondage that they are free to see God. We see from the early chapters of Exodus that freedom for the people of Israel was a physical
deliverance from slavery in Egypt so that they would be free to worship God (Exodus 3:12). The deliverance was for the whole community, and then individuals benefitted. It was not every member of the community that left Egypt who made it to the promised land, but those who believed. Every community has its spiritual darkness, and this will manifest itself in the visible realm in differing ways. Our church, Temple of Praise, moved into Anfield in Liverpool in the early 1990s, worshipping first in an old Presbyterian church building and then later in a refurbished Gaumont Palace cinema building, both a couple of hundred metres from Liverpool Football Club’s world-renowned stadium. The area was gripped by a darkness that showed itself in real acts of wickedness – shootings, violence, murder. The body of a young prostitute was found chopped up and left in a bin bag just up the road
